


Another World

by TheSovereigntyofReality



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universes, F/M, Not Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie) Compliant, Not Steve Friendly, Team Tony, Tony lives, not SHIELD friendly
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-07
Updated: 2018-12-07
Packaged: 2019-09-13 08:39:42
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,166
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16889250
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheSovereigntyofReality/pseuds/TheSovereigntyofReality
Summary: Tony answers a peculiar call to meet...himself!But this Tony Stark comes from a universe where Project Rebirth failed.





	Another World

**Author's Note:**

  * For [VWebb](https://archiveofourown.org/users/VWebb/gifts).



> **Disclaimer: If you recognise it from somewhere else, it isn't mine.**

The message that arrived through FRIDAY was encrypted to such a point it looked like Tony’s own work. Curiosity got the better of him and Tony went. He took a suit as back-up.  
He also had Vision come along and keep out of sight unless he was needed. When he stepped into the room, he stopped. He blinded and yanked his sunglasses off. The other man smirked to him.

‘You’re probably wondering who I am and why I look exactly like you,’ he said.

‘Yeah, just a bit.’ In fact, the only noticeable difference between Tony and this man was eye colour. While Tony had brown eyes, this man had blue.

‘Well, I’m basically you from another universe.’ He held up a device. ‘I used this to get here. And, I’ll tell you, it was an absolute bitch to work out. I had to get Shuri to help me.’

Tony cocked an eyebrow. ‘Shuri? As in Princess of Wakanda? That Shuri?’

‘One and the same. I guess you guys don’t have any sort of good relationship with Wakanda then? It doesn’t surprise me.’

‘What do you mean?’ Tony asked.

Other!Tony (because that’s how he was thinking of him now), nodded his head and walked to the back of the room. Tony followed him and realised there was a gurney pushed up against the back wall with an odd-shaped bulk underneath a sheet. Other!Tony lifted the sheet and Tony flinched back.

‘Ugh!’

‘Yeah,’ Other!Tony said. ‘He ended up in my dimension. I have no idea how because he was very non-compliant with answering that. Seemed to think I was a devil incarnate or something.’ He covered the mangled corpse of Steve Rogers back up.

‘That doesn’t surprise me,’ Tony said. ‘He always had to argue with me.’

Other!Tony nodded. ‘Can you hazard a guess at what happened?’

‘I don’t know for sure, of course,’ Tony said. ‘But I’d say he stumbled across some kind of quantum experiment that he determined to be wrong and decided to stop it by punching it.’

‘Punched something he shouldn’t have, and ended up getting tossed through the dimensional walls.’ Other!Tony surmised. ‘That makes sense. Seemed like a right technophobe.’

‘Oh, he is.’ Tony looked at the corpse and winced. ‘Was.’ He shook his head. Well, Captain America was dead – for real this time. There was a tiny part of Tony that was happy about it. Served him right after Siberia. The other part was dreading the PR nightmare that this would become.

Other!Tony nodded his head. ‘You want a recording, it’s already started.’ He nodded to where he’d previously set up a recording system. Tony noted that it was angled in such a way that the camera wouldn’t have recorded the sight of the device Other!Tony had used to get here.

‘Okay, so...how did he die?’ Tony asked.

‘Well, that goes back to Project Rebirth.’ Other!Tony pointed at the corpse. ‘Whereas it worked here, it didn’t work in my dimension. After the third try, they scrapped it.’

‘So there was no Captain America in your history?’

‘None.’ Other!Tony shrugged. ‘In the 1950s, the SSR converted into S.H.I.E.L.D., however there was a clear difference: S.H.I.E.L.D. believed that all enhanced needed to be exterminated with extreme prejudice as they were a danger to society.’

‘Oh...’ Tony could see where this was going. ‘So basically what happened was Rogers, used to S.H.I.E.L.D. kissing his ass and covering it when he did stupid things, expected the same from your version and didn’t listen to you telling him otherwise.’

Other!Tony nodded his head in a somewhat exaggerated manner, as if the frustration of the fact was only now leaking out. ‘That’s about it.’

Part of Tony itched to ask more. Did Other!Howard have anything to do with the founding of that S.H.I.E.L.D.? Did Other!Tony have his own Iron Man suit? But the fact of the matter was, this exchange was for the public, so that everyone knew why Captain America’s mangled corpse was being brought home by an alternate Tony Stark. ‘Yeah, he was good at that. If he didn’t want to hear it, he wouldn’t listen. How did you get involved?’

‘Well, S.H.I.E.L.D.’s opinion of all enhanced stems from a single woman that Carter clashed with in 1947, Whitney Frost – who was, to be frank, drunk on her power. I’m involved because dad decided to stand against them. He often argued that one person was not a suitable sample size to judge all of them by.’

Well, that answered question number 1.

_No._

Other!Tony went on. ‘Dad started covering the enhanced and actively concealing them from S.H.I.E.L.D., and he taught me to do it too from a young age. You can probably guess the rest.’

Tony nodded. ‘I wonder what’s worse: being used as a living weapon or locked up, or just being shot where you stood.’

‘Probably the living weapon one,’ Other!Tony remarked. ‘So, yeah.’ He looked at the corpse. ‘That’s pretty much what happened the Rogers. But there was a silver lining.’

‘S.H.I.E.L.D. exposed itself when they killed him?’ Tony asked.

Other!Tony shrugged. ‘I should probably thank him for his look-at-me-I’m-a-special-snowflake mentality. Sure, he ripped up a street in New York, but people still saw S.H.I.E.L.D. open fire on him with the wounded and the bystanders all still around. And as the public is wont to do when that happens...’

Tony finished that one. ‘...They asked questions.’

‘And I provided the answers.’ Other!Tony looked completely unrepentant. ‘Due to S.H.I.E.L.D.’s habit of shooting dead any enhanced no matter what their powers are, where they are, or how old they are – and I’m including children in that – they’ve been branded, at best, lawless vigilantes and, at worst, terrorists.’

‘Hm,’ Tony mused. And the way he was talking it would be easy for anyone who saw this recording to jump to the conclusion that their version of S.H.I.E.L.D. was just the same.

Welp! There went Fury’s big rebuilding scheme.

Tony walked over to Rogers’ body. ‘Well, I suppose we better work out what to do with this. No family left to claim him.’

***

Tony had FRIDAY release the footage to their dear friend, Christine Everhart.

It was on the air the next time she was. Tony dealt with the burial formalities, while Other!Tony filled out all the necessary paperwork for his witness testimony on what happened.  
As they worked, they talked. They were, in effect, comparing notes. They both asked a lot of questions in honest-to-God befuddled tones.

‘So they were actually friends here?’

‘You mean there are actually other teams besides the Avengers there?’

And, yes, they were both Iron Man. They just ended up in the same cave in different ways.

‘A business partner?’

‘Somehow it seems a lot more fitting that a business rival would do it.’

Same man, different relationship.

In fact, it seemed the only difference between him and his no-Captain-America-in-my-dimension counterpart was their life experiences.

Underneath that, though, they were the exact same person.

Soon, though, it was time for Other!Tony to leave.

‘Keep an eye out for the Fantastic 4,’ Other!Tony told him as he readied the device.

‘The what?’ Tony asked.

‘Four scientists go into space,’ Other!Tony said. ‘They were there to observe a cloud of cosmic energy. But the cloud diverted course and brushed over them instead. It imbued them all with enhancements based on their personalities. Because they were scientists, they kept quiet about it. The first indicator of their powers was, at least for us, when they used them to save a whole bunch of people in downtown New York. Bang! Instant celebrities, much to the chagrin of three out of the four.’

‘And that protected them from S.H.I.E.L.D.?’

‘Yup, as I actually had to explain to them. They only accepted it, and took on the role of heroes, out of self-preservation. They’ll probably do the same here. And they deal mostly in alien invasions.’

Tony nodded. ‘So once they’re active, I’ll actually have some back-up for this impending invasion.’

‘Pretty much.’ Other!Tony handed over the StarkPad he’d been using in his stay here. ‘And it won’t be too much longer.’

Tony looked down at the Pad, which was detailing a scientific expedition about to take place. Four scientists were heading to an observation satellite to observe an oncoming cosmic cloud. Tony took note of the names: Reed Richards, Susan Storm, Johnny Storm, and Benjamin Grimm. These people must’ve been the Fantastic Four.

‘Seems kind of small for a space expedition,’ Tony remarked.

Other!Tony shook his head. ‘I don’t know. Don’t ask me.’

***

Tony sat in the penthouse, watching the take-off that would lead to the creation of the Fantastic Four with Pepper, Rhodey, Vision, and Happy.

‘Tony,’ Vision said. ‘Do you believe what your counterpart said?’

‘Yes, I do,’ Tony said. ‘I can easily see it happening like that and I did look up this Whitney Frost person.’

‘She was real here too?’ Rhodey asked.

‘An actress in the 40s that was married to a rich, white prick,’ Tony said. ‘She came into contact with something called zero matter and it gave her super-human strength and durability. But it was also slowly killing her, and she wanted more. Like my alternate counterpart said, she was drunk on power.’

‘So the Whitney Frost thing stood up,’ Pepper said. ‘What else did?’

‘Well, you saw the state of Rogers before they patched him up,’ Tony mused.

Pepper narrowed her eyes. ‘And it’ll be burned into my retinas for the rest of my life.’

‘And I’m sorry about that, but I did tell you not to look.’ Tony gave a sheepish grin. ‘Well, when I finally let Fury in he pussyfooted around it, but he finally admitted that they did have guns that could do that. In fact, when he first saw Rogers’ body, he thought a rogue agent had got at him.’

Vision spoke up again. ‘So they have developed the weaponry, Whitney Frost did exist. What else have you found that convince you his words were true.’

‘He gave me the names of other enhanced that would help,’ Tony said. ‘A lot of other enhanced. The Defenders, the X-Men – whose leader I’m meeting with on Monday, by the way – and the Inhumans just to name a few. The Inhuman Royal Family, to be more precise.’

Rhodey’s eyes widened. ‘There’s an Inhuman Royal Family?’

‘Uh huh,’ Tony said. ‘And they have a colony on the moon. I sent a report up there of the Battle of New York. A couple of days later, I get a call from the Inhuman Queen herself. The King's power, it turns out, is a sonic voice. Any time he makes any noise, he makes a sonic blast so he can’t actually speak without causing destruction.’

Pepper nodded. ‘So his wife is the mouthpiece.’

‘Precisely. She wanted to know more details about the invasion, so I told her. I told her what led up to it, what happened in the battle and what I saw through the portal.’ His voice took on a dry tone. I’ve gotta say, it was nice not to be dismissed when saying I saw a _fucking armada_ waiting to invade Earth.’

Rhodey winced. ‘So what’d she say?’

‘Apparently, the Inhumans had been noticing unknown ships on the periphery of Earth’s orbit,’ Tony said. ‘She considered this a satisfactory explanation for what they were. She’s also considering doing a recall of all Inhuman on Earth, which means S.H.I.E.L.D. very quickly loses Quake.’

‘Quake?’ Happy asked.

‘An Inhuman agent they acquired a few years back,’ Tony said. ‘I did mention her to Medusa – that’s the Queen’s name, funnily enough, so she’s first on their list of extractees. Apparently, they have a teleporting dog, which just sounds _awesome_.’

Rhodey chuckled along with Happy, but then he said, ‘All right, these invaders. Do they know the Inhumans are there?’

‘Medusa doesn’t think so,’ Tony said. ‘That’s where you come in, Viz.’

‘Oh, yes?’ Vision asked.

‘Apparently, these guys were keeping a close eye on the Avengers,’ Tony said. ‘Medusa wants to test their awareness of the Inhumans by having one of us come up to the Inhuman settlement. She thinks you’d be accepted up there more easily than anybody else – oh, and she doesn’t feel comfortable having fugitives there. She wants to see if “the moon” would be an option for “an Avenger” going missing.’

Vision looked thoughtful, and then he slowly nodded. ‘Will I need to bring anything?’

‘Nah. Medusa says they’ll supply everything.’


End file.
